Last weekend was jam packed with little adventures around the town that broadened our view of Tokyo and its culture.
It all began Friday night when Paul and I attended a cooking class together at Mayuko's Little Kitchen - my third, his one and only. Our fellow classmates were a lovely woman from Northern Ireland who is here on assignment, and a family (British mom, American dad, and their 12-year-old daughter who was born and mostly raised in Beijing) also here for a job assignment.
Mayuko had a feast ready for us to prepare - sesame yellow tail over rice, tempura, green veggies soaked in dashi (seaweed stock), and Shijimi clam miso soup. I LOVED the yellow tail. It was incredibly tender and not fishy at all. However, I had a hard time with the clam soup - my chopsticks skills are not the best, and fishing those little clams out of the bowl was pretty impossible for me. Paul took a different approach. He just used his hands to fish out the clams. It wasn't a pretty sight, but he at least was able to enjoy that course. I opted to skip it. 😐 Two more classes are scheduled before we leave. Mayuko has been a great find!
Saturday was beautiful here - sunny and almost 70 - the perfect day for a baseball game. Jingu Stadium is within walking distance from our apartment, home of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, one of Japan's professional baseball teams. So we headed over there to see them take on the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles (no relation to Marquette). As in the U.S., baseball is the national pastime here. Like us, they don the jerseys of their favorite players, load up on stadium food and drink, and take to the stands to cheer on their team. They absolutely love it - and are especially proud of their fellow countryman and baseball phenom, Shohei Ohtani, although maybe less so of his personal affiliation with his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, Japan's answer to Art Schlichter.
The stadium's dining options were definitely different. No peanuts. No hot dogs. No brats. Our first clue that the food might just be so-so was all the food trucks just outside of the main gate. Hindsight being 20:20, we would have been better off picking up something out there to eat. Instead, we waited in line at a food stall near our seats only to have the one recognizable sandwich we wanted sell out. We ended up buying something akin to chicken nuggets, but they didn't taste like chicken nuggets. Not being sure what they were exactly, I let Paul finish them off and decided to wait for dinner to eat. The beer was tasty though, and I was fascinated with their distribution system. Pretty young women (no men and no seniors mind you) put giant beer bladders on their backs and sell cups of draft brews right there in the stands. It seemed to me like a pretty ingenious system, though the "beertenders" could be a much more diverse group. Just sayin'...
The bleachers is apparently the place to be. That's where all the diehard fans sat - and much more comfortably than us I suspect. Our seats were tiny - no leg room, no shoulder room. They were just plain uncomfortable with people pressing up right next to us from all sides. But, we made the best of it.
Anyway, the hometown fans sat in the right field bleachers, and the visiting team's fans sat in the left field bleachers. Then the "battle of the stands" commenced. When the home team was at bat, that side of the bleachers went nuts - waving flags, and cheering and singing in unison with drums and horns backing them up. In fact, the guy in back of me told his English-speaking companion that there is a designated cheer or song for every player on the team which they break into whenever that player is at bat. The same happened when the visiting team was batting. It was clearly a friendly competition and I couldn't quite tell which side won.
We were especially excited for the seventh-inning stretch. Paul had read that the Swallow fans do something with umbrellas - so we brought along our little black travel umbrella hoping to participate. Turns out, you need a Swallows-sanctioned umbrella to partake in the spectacle. They stood in unison, popped open the umbrellas and sang a song while moving up and down with the umbrellas in hand - it was quite the performance.
Unfortunately, the Swallows' pitchers had a tough day on the mound. When the writing was on the wall, we bailed in search of a decent meal outside of the stadium walls. All in all, it was a lot of fun to see how professional baseball is done here.
We rose the next morning to St. Patrick's Day - my first as a dual U.S.-Irish citizen! I had looked up what events might be happening in Tokyo fully expecting to find nothing, only to discover that Asia's largest St. Patrick's Day celebration was occurring just a few blocks down the road. We arrived in the early afternoon at Omotesando, a tree-lined, luxury shopping avenue similar to 5th in NYC, to take in the city's St. Paddy's Day parade.
It was pretty hysterical. There were all these Japanese folks dressed in green, dancing, singing and marching.
There were bagpipes, kilts, harps, Irish setters, blow-up Guinness balloons, and the like, but curiously, the songs we heard were not Irish tunes. In fact, the one big marching band played Disney songs - specifically "Zip-A-Dee-Do-Da" and "A Whole New World." Kind of odd, but oh well. Fun was had by all.
We then meandered down to nearby Yoyogi Park which was hosting Tokyo's annual Green Ireland Festival. I was really hoping for some corned beef, but alas, there was none. And by the time we got there, the Shepherd's Pie and lamb stew were sold out. We had to settle for Japan's version of a Gyro and some weird "French fries" that were clearly not real given their ridiculous length. Again, the food was disappointing, but I honestly think this festival was not prepared for the onslaught of Irish wannabees that attended. The place was packed - I'm sure the beautiful weather had a lot to do with that. It was also heartening (and surprising) to hear quite a number of people speaking with real Irish brogues. In a place where you don't see tons of Westerners, there were plenty around that afternoon. It brought new meaning to "being Irish for a day" and did my heart good.
We then set out for Shibuya, a close-by and busy area of the city, in our quest to find a Reuben sandwich. Though we had no Irish luck on that front, we did find an authentic Irish pub where we enjoyed a couple of pints with other revelers. We ended our day with pizza in an Italian joint. Go figure.
On the whole, it was a really fun weekend that made us realize that though there are plenty of cultural differences among us, there are some things that we all truly enjoy. ⚾🍺🍀
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